Szechuan Gourmet Goes for the Burn

Szechuan Gourmet

“NOW this is just sort of cool and refreshing,” I remarked to my tablemates as I pinched some more of the sectioned cucumbers with my chopsticks and ferried them down the hatch. “It’s a nice, clean little break from the fire, and it ...”

Hold on. Wait a second. Something was starting to happen in my mouth.

First came a few flickers, then a few more. This blaze was perhaps gentler than the one sparked by the sesame noodles moments earlier, though maybe more forceful than anything the glistening orange oil beneath the pork dumplings had wrought.

It was sneakier than either, that much was certain. And it definitely wasn’t a reprieve.

At Szechuan Gourmet, a restaurant on a drab Midtown block that fans of Sichuan cooking should be visiting in greater numbers and with greater frequency than they are, the heat is almost always on, and it comes at you in different ways.

Sometimes it hits you full blast with your first bite of a dish and never lets up. Sometimes it starts small and builds, a late bloomer. And sometimes it lies in wait, biding its time before stating its case.

“I feel like I ate a wolverine,” wrote one friend in an e-mail message after a lunch there, and what struck me wasn’t the sentiment. It was the time stamp. The message had been sent six hours after the meal was over.

Sichuan’s inimitable heat is a big part — for me, the main part — of what makes this cuisine such a riveting adventure.

And up until a few weeks ago, I thought I had to go to the Flushing section of Queens to enjoy that adventure to its fullest in New York. Flushing is home to Spicy & Tasty, local Sichuan lovers’ justly designated shrine.

Szechuan Gourmet is in Flushing, too, and has been since 2002. But neither that location nor the Manhattan branch — added in 2004 — commands quite as much reverence as Spicy & Tasty. And while the Manhattan branch’s cooking isn’t exactly as bold as Spicy & Tasty’s, it’s close enough to raise the question of why this restaurant, though recognized, isn’t more of a rage.

My own theory is that it’s too convenient for cult status and adulation. For food pilgrims who don’t live in Queens, a meal at Spicy & Tasty is a shinier badge of honor; proof of a willingness to invest travel time and head in unglamorous directions for great food.

A meal at Szechuan Gourmet, situated within a few blocks of about a dozen different subway lines that converge around Times Square, doesn’t feel as much like a reward for a sacrifice. But the lighting, from many red paper lanterns, is kinder. The décor is less blunt.

And servers reliably do the one thing above all others that you want them to when you’re eating family style — which you most definitely should — and depositing portions of so many different dishes on the tasting plate in front of you. Just when that plate begins to resemble a painter’s messy palette, the colors bleeding into one another, the servers replace it.

The menu sprawls to more than 100 selections — it’s too much, but then at this genre of restaurant it’s always too much — and focuses on Sichuan, with some nods to other Chinese traditions as well.

It allows culinary daredevils to strut their stuff, giving them stir-fried duck tongue and stir-fried frogs (the whole critter — chopped — not just the legs) and stir-fried pig intestines. It coddles tamer eaters, too. There are honey-glazed spare ribs, for heaven’s sake.

But don’t get those. Please don’t get those. Get something that showcases the fabled “ma la” of Sichuan cooking, the tingly-fiery effect of Sichuan peppercorns and chili peppers, often infused into sesame oil, the results pooling at the bottom of a dish, a multi-toned sunset, maroon, bronze and ochre.

Photo

NO NEED FOR HOT SAUCE Szechuan Gourmet in Midtown keeps the heat on.Credit
Rebecca McAlpin for The New York Times

Get, for example, the braised beef or fish fillets with Napa cabbage. There’s a thick dust of ground chilies on top.

But neither the cooking nor the spicing here is one dimensional; there’s more than just heat coming out of the chef Cheng Zhong Huang’s kitchen. (Mr. Huang is also the owner.)

What you’ll notice before the chilies in an excellent appetizer of sliced pork belly is the garlic, lots of it, along with a sweetened soy sauce reduction that vaguely mimics balsamic vinegar.

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You’ll notice the cumin coating crispy fried lamb fillets (my favorite entree) and you’ll be riveted by how loud and clear it rings. You’ll notice, mixed into the soybean paste around a whole striped bass, ginger as well as garlic, and you’ll detect star anise in other dishes.

I found the tea-smoked duck at Szechuan Gourmet more tender than at Spicy & Tasty, and I encountered an addictive dish I’d never seen or tasted before. It was shredded potatoes stir-fried in hot oil, from which they emerged as slick, firm, noodle-like strands: stand-ins, apparently, for daikon radish in a more traditional treatment.

Although I’ve repeatedly invoked Spicy & Tasty, a better point of reference for many Manhattan diners may be the estimable Grand Sichuan restaurants, and I swung by the newest one, in Greenwich Village, between visits to Szechuan Gourmet.

It paled in comparison. The ma-po tofu was less creamy and — no surprise — less spicy. The sauce on the sesame noodles traded sizzle for sweetness. Szechuan Gourmet wouldn’t do that.

It has its limitations: no hard liquor, a short list of wines you won’t yearn to drink, an even shorter list of desserts so negligible that servers don’t bother to ask if you want one before dropping the check. Meals here can be rushed, especially at lunch, when the restaurant is busiest.

But they’re full of surprises, and the wolverine among them won’t kill you.

Szechuan Gourmet

**

21 West 39th Street, (212) 921-0233.

ATMOSPHERE A relatively unadorned but comfortable room of about 70 seats, most at tables with off-white cloths, on a drab Midtown block.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.